Book Review: Lunch Ladies

Reviewed by Addison Ciuchta

A quiet, reflective novel about aging, regret, and community

Shelia, Coralene, and Crystal all work at the Hanley School District’s lunch department, managing the cafeterias of elementary through high schools in the area. As summer of 1976 nears, they are tasked with coming up with ideas for food to be served at the bicentennial parade, marking the two-hundred-year anniversary of the United States. 

But Crystal spends her days obsessing over obituaries of strangers, Coralene has a nephew who needs her help, and Shelia’s tendency toward isolation is pulling her into her thoughts more and more. The lunch ladies and the people around them, both family and friends, reckon with their daily lives, their lost loves, and the loved ones who need their help as the parade nears.

Crystal, Coralene, and Shelia are all wonderfully complex characters with fully fleshed out voices that make switching between their perspectives easy to follow. It’s even easier to root for them. In other cases, things like Crystal’s obsession with obituaries or Shelia’s intense isolation might be off-putting, but here, it only makes them more endearing. The book gives middle-aged women a place to be themselves, odd or sad or tragic as they may be. They are allowed to grieve the lives they left behind, the paths they didn’t follow, the futures uncertain ahead of them. It’s a somber book sometimes, more than I expected, but it’s a welcome, soft kind of somber. Not accusatory or devastating, but a gentle undercurrent. 

This is a story that makes you reflect on your own life, your own losses, your own dreams you may have left behind. It’s a comfort to know others feel the same way, even if they are characters in a book. Others who grieve the same way, yearn the same way, regret the same way you do.

“She named this weight. It was the loneliness one, made heavier by layers of regret.”

The writing is sharp and not always in a somber way. While most of the emotion of the novel comes from reflection and grief, there is humor mixed in—like with the lunch ladies’ boss sending memos constantly about dog shows his dog is competing in. It balances the heaviness of the narrative well as do the soft moments of connection and of community as they prepare for the bicentennial parade.

“Her life had backfilled with the futility of hope: that someone else would clean up the kitchen, take out the garbage, or bring her a second cup of coffee.”

The pacing is on the slower side, more slice-of-life than a story hurtling toward a climax. While the goal of the women is to get through the bicentennial, most of the narrative is investigating their lives, their pasts, and the people they interact with. Often, characters from one woman’s storyline appear in another, weaving them together to form a sort of narrative community. The point of view mostly stays with Shelia, Crystal, or Coralene but sometimes jumps to another of the smaller characters like the waitress that serves Shelia at Denny’s. This can be jarring at times but adds a layer of richness to the setting and to the narrative as they, too, deal with their own lives, losses, and griefs.

“Two roads will always diverge, it’s who we travel with that makes all the difference.”

Lunch Ladies radiates warmth as the women navigate their relatively average lives like the rest of us, full of complexity and loss and regrets that we’ve all felt before. It’s a truly well-written, reflective novel perfect for a book club or a rainy Sunday morning.

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